We
have been reading John K. Samson’s Lyrics
and Poems 1997-2012 in one of my current undergraduate classes. One of
things I want to interrogate critically about this book is the nature of that
“and” in its title: what can these texts tell us, as close readers and as
attentive listeners, about the relationship between lyrics and lyric, between
song and poem? I’m looking to describe a certain nascent melopoeia in John K. Samson’s conception
of how words work, in his conception of the cultural work of both singing and
saying, of performing. What, he seems to be asking in most of these pieces
(repurposing a famous provocation from Rainer Maria Rilke), what can singers
and singing be for in a destitute time such as ours?
I say nascent because, as you thumb
through the book, you’ll see that most of the lyrics are printed as if they are
prose, like brief essays or prose-poems. Spatially – at least, on the page –
this visual arrangement in discrete typographical blocks echoes the cover
design (which gestures, as well, at the cover for his 2012 album Provincial and at the graphic design of
his webpage), a grid page from an old ledger, sections of which have been
filled in with brown and blue hashmarks in pen. The effect, I think, is to
gesture at an imaginary map of a parceled rural landscape, the Latin squares of
prairie agricultural space. Hand-drawn lines – lines of ink but also lines of
poetry – take on topographical resonances. These are songs preoccupied with articulating a human subject in space, with what amounts to placing oneself. In
Canada, questions of who I am often become, following a lead from Northrop Frye, questions of where I am and where here is. But rather than fall back on
mythopoeic cultural nationalisms – generalizing an Anglo-Canadian psyche as
Frye might by locating and defining its (or our) territorial idiom – Samson
queries that relationship, and tends to inhabit its inadequacies, and to create
a pathos from and within that shortfall. In Vertical
Man / Horizontal World, Laurie Ricou reframes the prairie psyche as nascent
rather than determinate (and please pardon the gender bias here, which I think
is symptomatic of the time at which Ricou’s study was published): “the
landscape, and man's relation to it, is the concrete situation with which the
prairie artist initiates his re-creation of the human experience.” Ricou
understands this particular landscape as initiating re-creation, as aesthetic
disturbance, not as affirming a particular regional identity. The persona, the
speaking or singing subject, of a Samson song is usually “left or leaving,”
remaindered or else in the process of departure, “undefined” (as the lyric to
“Left or Leaving” puts it), but always seeking a positional relation, for better
or for worse, with a sense of home, tracking the “lines that you’re relying on
to lead you home.” Those lines are also literally nascent, at least in their
print form; reading the prose, you can hear metre and rhyme begin to realize
themselves, as if lines were gently beginning to extricate themselves, audibly,
from an undifferentiated (undefined?) verbal flow, a lineated poem emerging –
although not quite emerged – from the prose. It’s not so much that the
prose-poem aspires to the condition of song as it is that we experience a sort
of hiatus, a space of what the lyrics for “Left and Leaving” might call “waiting,”
between conception and realization, between text and song: a betweenity Samson
thematizes as “and,” as an unclosed ampersand.
The printed lyrics to “Highway One West” realize this
betweenity both typographically and compositionally. The poem begins and ends
with nine single-word lines. (The exception is the first line, which adds an
extra word, tellingly the first word of the poem, another “And . . . .”) Framed
by these narrow plummets, between them, are five lines of what look like prose
– although they’re not prosaic in any sense, but tend toward metaphorical
density:
And it
didn’t
take
long
for
the
words
to
slow,
roll over the gravel shoulder,
thump into the ditch,
engine cut, battery dying,
the station metastasizing
tumours of evangelists and
ads for vinyl siding,
the city some cheap EQ with
the mids pushed up
in the one long note of
wheat.
Too
far
to
walk
to
any
where
from
here.
The 9 + 5 + 9 line-structure
mimics a kind of overlapped sonnet. (“(manifest)” and “(past due)” from Reconstruction Site are both sonnets, in
fact.) More than this ghostly resonance with literary form, however, the
spatial disposition of the lines offers a visual analogue to the physiography
in which the subject finds himself immersed. If you turn the page sideways, you
can see the high-rise buildings of Winnipeg – or at least of “the city” –
emerging in the centre of a flat prairie, the horizon created by a line of
upended words. “Here,” the last word of the poem, is produced as a mimesis of
distant surveillance, too far away to walk back to. The where of the poem is
too far, moreover, from everywhere else; it is an elsewhere, alienated and
alienating.
Notably,
the song begins in performance with the looping repetition of the last segment
(“Too far to walk . . .”), accompanied by a heavy, slow down-strum on the
electric guitar, the repetition reinforcing the sense of resigned exhaustion,
that “here” might be both everywhere and nowhere. The sounds coming over the
car radio – not music but distant voices, a verbal garbage offering false
promises of commercial or spiritual satisfaction – metastasizes into diseased
noise, rough static. Sound technologies – both for recording and reproduction –
offer another metaphorical (as opposed to metastasized) resonance to the
geographical descriptors; that urban bump in the middle of the landscape mimics
a graphic equalizer with the midrange sliders pushed up. The song gestures, in part,
at the electronics used to produce it, and to reproduce it. But if, both
visually and sonically, the lyrics and the recorded performance gesture at
alienation and at loss, the text also frames and even recovers a degree of
expressive potential – finds its voice – from within those horizontal margins,
pulled over onto the shoulder of Highway One West, the Trans Canada. The page
layout also mimics, coincidentally perhaps, a photograph of John K. Samson,
used by The Globe and Mail, that looks
like it was taken somewhere out on Highway One.
(I don’t know whom to credit
for this photo.) The singer’s image, particularly with his back turned to the
lens, echoes the middle section of the poem, while the highway and prairie
skyline are picked up by the one-word horizontals. (Again, the page has to be
turned sideways to see the mirroring.) What this accidental similarity
suggests, for me, is a version of Ricou’s vertical man / horizontal world. The
song itself has only a vestigial subjective presence: there is no “I” among the
words, which are primarily objective and attenuated. But the voice, the
speaking subject here, presents itself, ghosts itself into the song, as a
hiatus, an opening in the mids and in the midst of this landscape. The singer pauses on the shoulder, at the left-hand
margin of the road and of the page, to look out and, especially, to listen. The
song models, I want to suggest, a late or “weak” practice of attention, an
opening of the self to audibility – both heard and hearing, left and leaving –
that positions the subject as initiating its own recreation, cobbling itself
together from interpellative fragments that he tries to hear, see and identify
with as maybe, elsewise, his own.
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